


we hear so much about what love feels like

by buckstiel



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: F/F, Feelings Realization, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Movie Night, Post-Series, Spoilers, compulsory heterosexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 16:38:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11924910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: Life goes on after the events at Midland Circle, but not like it had been.(With Danny halfway across the world chasing who-knows-what, Colleen picks up the pieces and finds new ways to put them together.)





	we hear so much about what love feels like

**Author's Note:**

> i'm currently neck-deep in a writing rut but watching an entire season of these two be Clearly Into Each Other despite being written into a mess of het demanded something. hence this. 
> 
> quidnunc-life continues her streak as a super beta, as always.
> 
> title from "i don't miss it" by tracy k. smith.

Colleen sees less of Danny after Midland Circle no longer leads local news headlines. Her dojo is quiet when she comes in before classes, the door still locked, and the night’s thin layer of dust remains undisturbed along the usual path his bare feet lead him. It’s not like he’s missing--just busy, inserting himself into his hospital’s board of directors as Misty transitions to rehab. Meetings with the heads of departments, independent research at Columbia’s medical library, even attempting to track down Tony Stark upstate.

(“I’m not letting them give Misty some subpar prosthetic when I--billionaires listen to other billionaires, right? They take each other’s calls?”)

So she doesn’t see him, doesn’t get replies to her texts in anything resembling a timely manner, but it’s okay. It’s fine. She starts up new classes and spots some familiar faces hovering in the back--Malcolm on Tuesdays, Karen on Saturday evenings. And Karen always invites her down to Josie’s afterwards, once the rest of the class has trickled out and the sweat’s dried.

Foggy always meets them, one vodka shot tight between knuckles and two more waiting for them, for the same treatment. They don’t talk about Matt. Colleen doesn’t talk about how the sheen of Josie’s neon lights catch in Karen’s hair and presses a thumb against her throat. As the night wears on, Foggy pretends to know enough about baseball to comment on the Mets game shining down on the half-empty handles behind the bar, and he gives up as soon as Karen laughs.

The bar hums in time with the flush of her skin and she can’t thank Foggy enough for breaking through Karen’s level demeanor, for bringing that bit of levity into the tight hold of her own chest and loosening it. She can’t thank him enough so she doesn’t try, smiles to herself with the lip of her cocktail glass between her teeth. And after last call, on the trek back to her apartment, she forgoes the subway and lets the wind force her liquor-logged head to focus, lay Karen and Danny’s laughs side-by-side. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

(In the mornings, sometimes, she’ll find a text from Danny. He’s in India now. Tony Stark was at a wedding there and left abruptly with his phone to his ear, and it would just be a little longer. If Tony knew the Winter Soldier, then Misty could get the best prosthetic available, couldn’t she? He couldn’t see why not.)

Sundays, after chugging a Gatorade and slapping together a breakfast burrito to fight the headache, Colleen ventures uptown. Sundays Luke has filled up with basketball tournaments with local kids and forcing Jessica to have something other than a liquid dinner and the densely-coiled boredom from Claire’s apartment is enough to push hairline cracks into the mortar. So Colleen shows up one afternoon with her beat-up copy of _Ip Man_ on DVD and a pizza. They find the sequel on Netflix afterwards but stop halfway through because Claire is telling her a story from nursing school and her big beautiful eyes spark with every plot twist. Even after the laptop screen dims, the room stays bright. Warm. Colleen offers a comment on Claire’s old lab partner and it earns her a snort and a hand on her shoulder and that thumb Karen pressed on her throat is a whole hand now. Every Sunday it returns, gripping a fraction harder than before--and something about it digs uncomfortably into Colleen’s stomach but she keeps coming back, keeps showing up to Claire’s apartment with a new Donnie Yen film. Waiting for it, her heart racing when it finally does.

The week starts over: Tuesday classes with Malcolm, Saturday with Karen, but then a few weeks into their new Sunday routine Claire signs up for private lessons on Monday and Wednesday mornings, showing up to the dojo in yoga pants and a zip-up hoodie that would always strip down to a sports bra. Whatever Colleen would be saying would trip over itself, twisting into a knot before it leaves her lungs.

“Like this?” Claire asks, their bodies flush, arms locked and blocking each other’s blows. 

“Yeah. Very good.” But it would always take Colleen half a moment to respond. 

Just as the weeks start over, they wear on. Midland Circle graduates from a pile of rubble to an empty pit and none of the cleanup crew finds a body with an ID they’re looking for. Malcolm and Karen finish their classes and don’t sign up for another, at least not immediately, and suddenly Colleen is left with Saturday nights as empty as she had been used to--before Danny appeared around the corner at the park balancing too many chips on his shoulders and superheroes existed in the periphery of her life. The emptiness is familiar but it’s grown in the time away.

The hour slips closer to midnight and her thumb hovers over Danny’s thread in her text inbox. _I don’t know what timezone you’re in right now but do you want to give me a call if you can?_ She drafts a couple more potential messages before scrolling back up to the more recent logs, Luke and Karen and then Claire, right at the top, and that one she opens without hesitation. The message basically composes and sends itself-- 

_I can’t sleep, was thinking about getting a drink someplace in Midtown if you’re in the area._

Half a minute later, her phone buzzes with a sunglasses emoji and a screenshot of her current location in the maps app--the south corner of Bryant Park, where Colleen finds her sitting cross-legged on a bench, grinning to herself while the city wails and hums around them.

“Interesting spot for some nighttime meditation,” she says, taking a seat beside her. 

“Yeah, well…” She shrugs. Throws a sideways glance at the Rockefeller Center towering over the buildings before them. “My neighbors are less likely to find me here.” 

Colleen doesn’t press the issue, but she wants to. The urge to press other things rises, too--a hand on Claire’s knee, the braid of her clasped fingers laying in her lap. Instead she stares. Waits for her to continue, waiting for her own thoughts to ebb far enough that she could pretend she didn’t notice. 

“Insomnia, huh?” Claire says after a moment. 

“Something like it.” 

Around the corner is a basement bar Claire had heard about from her old fellow ER nurses--it’s not as crowded as it could be and not as expensive as it should be, and while their table in the corner has a wobble to it, nothing they order that could spill ever does. Colleen orders them each two fingers of her favorite bourbon, Claire something bright blue but delicious, not too sweet. By the time the bar sits a little too warm around them, Claire’s eyes catch the dim lights just right and Colleen almost chokes on her IPA, almost lets that old tide return from its ebb and guide the tip of her shoe to Claire’s ankle. Or her hand to her wrist once she sets the bottle down and clears her throat.

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” she says. A smile is reassuring, so she tacks one on for good measure even as her heart pounds against her ribs in a panic.

“So have you heard from Danny lately? What’s he even up to?”

“Honestly? I wish I had a better idea.” And she’s not lying, but it’s also not true in the same way that it once was; and Claire stares at her from across the table, squinting, chin in hand. “What? I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.” 

“Okay, okay.” Claire holds her hands up, glancing down before meeting her gaze again, and something about it weighs down on Colleen’s shoulders, right in the spots tender from the day’s earlier classes. They stare at each other long enough that Colleen feels herself start to soften under that weight, until Claire finally speaks--“Can I pick the movie tomorrow?”

Instead of hiking back up to Harlem, she spends the night on Colleen’s couch--and Colleen spends the night staring at the ceiling as the fuzz of the alcohol peels away and, along with it, any excuses she’s made for herself. For the tides of those nudges to press parts of herself to Claire, to feel the warmth of her body weave its way through her shirt and against her palm, her face, anywhere.

(For a fleeting moment she thinks back to Danny and no, this is uncharted territory. It wasn’t quite like this before.)

The couch is lumpy but the next morning Claire insists she slept well, even as she drains her first mug of coffee and pours another before the dregs along the bottom have time to settle into a ring. It’s stronger than how Colleen usually makes it, the back of her throat pleading for an extra splash of creamer with the first few sips until the bitter twinge soothes itself into something pleasant.

The couch is lumpy, but not so lumpy that Claire would sit so close to her to avoid them as she pulls up the film.

“You ever seen _Young Frankenstein_?”

“Um…‘young’?”

“Yeah, it’s--just watch. It’s _very_ funny,” she says, and with the same authority she steps into when their vigilantes turn something bloody.

Onscreen, Gene Wilder stabs his thigh with a scalpel. Claire laughs like it’s the first time she’s seen it, leans against Colleen’s shoulder until it catches, until she leans back. And she’s seen so few comedies that it almost feels wrong to laugh at a film, because isn’t there some deeper seriousness that’s escaped her? Something everyone else has known for ages in the secure, cemented place of their lives in the world?

Claire laughs again and chases the thought away.

“Have you shown this to Luke?” Colleen calls to Claire in the kitchen--she’s refilling her coffee a third time and Netflix has paused on Marty Feldman’s smirking face, halfway to a quip.

“I tried,” she says. “He doesn’t sit still.” She sighs, dramatically rounds the corner of the counter until she’s back at the couch and standing over Colleen with an inscrutable furrow to her brow. “I don’t know. Things are different when we’re actually allowed to live our lives for once.”

It _has_ been quiet. Odd activity around the city has subsided to pre-Incident levels, a few flare-ups around Queens and Staten Island that barely shows up on their radar. No patterns to track, the old sense of urgency and baseline adrenaline gone. Colleen nods and follows Claire’s path down as she reclaims her seat and carefully sets the coffee on the end table, far from the edge. Follows the arc of her other hand as it falls along the back of the couch, and the pressure on her throat returns, this time with the name she whispered to the ceiling last night. It presses like that old urgency everyone’s been missing. Like life or death magnified across five boroughs.

“I know what you mean,” she says.

There’s a flash of teeth as Claire grins. “Yeah, I’d be surprised if the foundation didn’t notice all this shifting--”

Before she catches herself, Colleen laughs and leaves Claire halfway to her next word, mouth agape. “You think I’m so sturdy that I’m immobile?” And she’s mirroring Claire’s grin, the questioning tilt of it.

“I’m not sure what you--”

When Colleen takes Claire’s face in her hands, the grip on her throat loosens; and when she pulls them together, kisses her schoolgirl-clumsy, it finally relents without even forecasting a bruise. “I can shift too, you know.”

Claire says nothing, just searching her face and letting the angle of her grin wobble and waver along a hundred different emotions Colleen has no time to identify--then there’s a warmth at the back of her neck and Claire closes the distance again, softer this time, each slide of her lips across Colleen’s careful and slow and in rhythm with her hands winding through her messily-plaited hair.

Claire hums into her mouth and something in Colleen’s chest twists like fear but brighter, better--it’s something to chase instead of run from and she clambers into Claire’s lap, knees landing on either side of her hips and the balance shifts. Claire tips back over the arm of the couch and her mug clacks against the table, coffee pooling around an old magazine and spilling over the edge. There’s no carpet. It doesn’t matter. Colleen kisses her harder, runs her thumbs along the line of her cheekbones and the coffee will have to stay on the floor--just like Midland Circle will stay rubble and Danny will stay wherever he is, having lifted himself from the space where they overlapped. Claire’s hands, sliding down her back to rest on her hips, burn the image of him away.

_Young Frankenstein_ ’s end credits don’t run until long after the sun dips behind the skyline, the music humming along as Colleen mentally traces the line of Claire’s arms around her, how nothing’s quite fit against her like this before. The name for it will come later, she suspects, but for now she’ll call it _home_.


End file.
